Essay on Eco-Poetics Reading in The Wate Land by T.S. Eliot

What is an eco-poetics reading of T. S. Eliot’s, ‘The Waste Land’? In this discussion of Eliot’s poem I will examine the content through the optic of eco-poetics. Eco- poetics is a literary theory which favours the rhizomatic over the arborescent approach to critical analysis. The characteristics of the rhizome will provide the overarching structure for this essay. Firstly rhizomes can map in any direction from any starting point. This will guide the study of significant motifs in ‘The Waste Land.’ Secondly they grow and spread, via experimentation within a context. This will be reflected in the study of the voice and the language with which the poem opens. Thirdly rhizomes grow and spread regardless of breakage. This will allow for an†¦show more content†¦Again the description is bleak, (‘the sun beats .......the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief.’ ) Life-giving water is again absent, (‘the dry stone no sound of water.’ ) And moving transversally forward to section 5 brings the reader into the desertscape where there is an intensification of the oppressiveness . The absence of water is emphasised through repetition: ‘If there were water And no rock If there were rock And also water And water A spring A pool among the rock If there were the sound of water only.’ So dehydrated are the people that they are hallucinating, seeing people who are not there,(‘Who is the third who walks always beside you?’ ) There is the same stagnation that characterises the previous scenes; ‘dry sterile thunder without rain.’ There is an air of menace as ‘red sullen faces sneer and snarl/from doors of mudcracked houses ’ and this menace is realised as the cities of Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna and London